Audacity catapulted Rod Blagojevich into the governor’s mansion in Illinois, Democrats into the majority in Congress, and Barack Obama into the White House. Last week their audaciousness again was on display. Blagojevich went on one TV-interview program after another claiming he was an innocent victim. Democrats in the House of Representatives, in the middle of one of the worst economic crises in US history, packed a trillion-dollar appropriations bill full of self-serving programs that have little to do with job creation and economic recovery. And President Obama, flush with the adulation of an adoring media, reached across the isle to Republicans, then told them, “I won” the election so vote for my program and stop listening to Rush Limbaugh if you want to get things done.

Whatever people say about Blagojevich, you’ve got to admit, he’s shameless and fearless. He may be a crook--the jury is still out on that one--but if he is, he’s an audacious crook. Facing multiple federal corruption and conspiracy charges with more than a hundred hours of damning audiotape evidence against him, he had the audacity to compare himself to great men who overcame adversity and to call himself a victim of the Illinois legislature.

For a while there I began to suspect that Ann Coulter had agreed to pay Blagojevich’s legal fees if he went on national television and compared himself to Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Coulter’s new book, Guilty: Liberal "Victims" And Their Assault On America, advances the accusation that liberal democrats deliberately portray themselves as victims while victimizing others. Blagojevich’s outrageous behavior did more to publicize her best-selling book than some of her own outrageous statements.

Blagojevich, however, doesn’t need Coulter’s help (nor she his). He can raise all the money he needs to pay his legal expenses by doing those call-now-and-we'll-double-your-order-for-only-$19.95 commercials and selling used cars. And as a graduate of the Al Capone School of Media Management, he’s an expert at dealing with reporters. He has them just where he wants them. They’ll continue to write about him, even while he’s in prison. If there is one thing, besides criminal activity, that Blagojevich has in common with Capone, it's that he hates it when the media doesn't cover him just because he’s out of town.

Competing with Blago for the most audacious move of the week, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed HR-1: The Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The stated objective of the “stimulus” package was to create jobs and stem the recession of the US economy. Like kids in a candy store with a hundred dollar bill and a duffle bag, however, House Democrats showed little self-control.

Just about everyone agrees the economy is in dire straits and some form of government intervention is necessary to prevent a depression. The bill passed by the House, without a single Republican vote, took advantage of the situation to fund bigger government, barrels of pork, and billions in boondoggles. As Peggy Noonan phrased it in her January 30, 2009, column in the Wall Street Journal, “. . . the Democratic establishment in the House looks, not like people who are responding to a crisis, or even like people who are ignoring a crisis, but people who are using a crisis.”

Before President Obama asked the House to drop them from the bill, it included engines of economic growth like $200 million to re-sod the 700-acre National Mall, and $200 million for a bailout for Planned Parenthood and contraception. The latter wouldn’t have created many jobs, but it would certainly have reduced the number of people looking for one 20 years from now.

Still in the bill are $4.19 billion for "neighborhood stabilization activities” (remember ACORN), $650 million for digital converter boxes, millions more for programs like the National Endowment for the Arts that have more to do with the liberal agenda than they do with economic recovery. The bill now moves to the Senate, where, hopefully, Obama will exercise some adult supervision over Harry Reid and his Democratic colleagues.

Obama, ever presidential in his demeanor, was not without his own flash of audacity. He reached out to Congressional Republicans in an attempt to build support for the stimulus package, but then couldn't resist the opportunity to remind them that, “I won” the election and, “You just can’t listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.” Nostalgia for the campaign and the absence of a Republican to run against apparently overcame him, and he decided to run against Limbaugh.

Limbaugh provided Obama and Democrats a target of opportunity when, appearing on the Sean Hannity show on the Fox News Channel, Limbaugh told Hannity that he wanted Obama to succeed but not his “socialist” policies. Limbaugh's and Obama's comments were all Moveon.org needed to demand that Congress immediately reinstitute the fairness doctrine, that would virtually guarantee the end of conservative talk radio, and launch political ads attacking Limbaugh. Expect to see a plethora of opinion polls in coming weeks that ask voters whether they favor Obama or Limbaugh in 2012.

This audacious attempt to court Republicans while dividing them briefly looked like it might work until House Speaker Nancy Pelosi alerted the Republican base to the ploy. Pelosi, in her inimitable un-audacious manner, said on national television that Republicans in Washington, DC, were out of touch with Republicans across the country. Telephones began ringing off the hook in Republican House and Senate offices as email servers crashed. Outraged Republicans demanded that their representatives in Washington vote against the bloated Democratic spending plan, even though they had no hope of blocking it.

Just a month into the new Democratic era in American politics and the Democrat's audacitometer already is in the red. You have to wonder how long it can stay there before the fuse blows.